Making an Ecopath model is like taking a course in ecology. In the construction main emphasis is on ecological relationships, not on the "modeling" per se. This feature has been made very clear by the courses and workshops conducted up to now -- in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan, South Africa and Thailand.
At several universities Ecopath is now being used as a part of the curriculum, e.g., by letting students work with test data sets, or as teamwork where the students are assigned different parts of an ecosystem, each group then securing input parameters from fieldwork or the literature, while the final model construction is done in plenum. Construction of Ecopath models have also shown very useful for graduate studies, and to date more than a dozen MS and Ph.D. theses have been completed using Ecopath as a structuring tool.
When constructing a model, information is needed of the trophic interactions of the entire ecosystem and this facilitates cooperation between, e.g., university researchers working on different ecological groups. As an example, production of prey must be sufficient to meet the requirements of the consumers. Therefore researchers who may perhaps otherwise remain focused on "their" groups of organisms must communicate, which may lead to cooperation, hypotheses testing, and other good things such as, publications presenting overviews of the important trophic flows in the system around a university field station.
Ecopath models pertain to a certain time period. However, by producing new models year after year, for instance as part of regular coursework or surveys, the door is opened for analysis of time series of whole system properties - something that has rarely been done before.